The influence of physical and mental constraints to a stream of people through a bottleneck

Abstract

Understanding movement in heterogeneous groups is important for a meaningful evaluation of evacuation prediction and for a proper design of buildings. The understanding of interactions and influencing factors in heterogeneous groups on key performance figures is fundamental for a safe design. This contribution presents results of experimental studies on movement of a crowd through a bottleneck involving participants with and without disabilities. High precise trajectories of the attendees extracted from video recordings were used to calculate density and velocity of the participants. Besides the well-established fundamental diagram new insights into the individual relation between density and velocity are discussed. A complex structure and considerate behaviour in movement implicates a strong influence of the heterogeneity on key performance values of safe movement.